George Richards, FHN Publisher
Once considered one of the bright, young pieces of the Florida Panthers’ future, Mike Matheson struggled the past two seasons and on Thursday was officially traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins along with Colton Sceviour.
The trade had been rumored since Wednesday although Sceviour had not previously been mentioned as being part of it.
Florida gets out from under the final six seasons of Matheson’s contract (of which he is owed $32 of the original $39 million) and nets veteran winger Patric Hornqvist in return.
In Hornqvist, the Panthers get a hard-nosed winger who is not only a two-time Stanley Cup champ but is one who can create space for Florida’s more skilled forwards as well as play in a bottom-six role.
A veteran of 770 NHL games over 12 seasons with Nashville and Pittsburgh, Hornqvist is a fan favorite as well as a popular player among his teammates.
Hornqvist, however, is 33 and has a recent injury history with two concussions in the 2018-19 season.
Bottom line: The Penguins are acquiring a player they hope can get his game to match his talent. Mike Matheson is extremely talented and when he’s on, he’s good.
The Florida Panthers did not want to bet six more years of contract on that and are getting in return a player they think can help them in numerous ways — at least in the immediate future.
The trade was initially reported Wednesday morning by Kevin Weekes of the NHL Network but took until Thursday to finally come together.
Dan Kingerski of PittsburghHockeyNow.com reported that the Penguins were having trouble reaching Hornqvist who has a full no-trade clause in his contract (which runs for the next three seasons at a cap hit of $5.3 million per CapFriendly.com) which means he would have had to approve a deal to any team.
Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet was first to report the trade was delayed after hitting a snag and later tweeted that the reason for the delay had to do with Florida being able to insure Hornqvist’s contract.
Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic confirmed the deal through the league late Thursday afternoon.
By taking on Hornqvist, Florida takes on almost $16 million of contract (but loses $12 million it would have paid Matheson plus the $1.2 million due Sceviour).
“A proven winner and champion, Patric brings a level of competition to our club,” new Florida GM Bill Zito said in a statement.
”He is a talented veteran presence who plays with an edge and we look forward to what he can add to our group.”
Last season, Hornqvist scored 17 goals with 32 points in 52 games and had a goal and an assist in four postseason games as the Penguins were bounced from the Toronto bubble by the 12th-seeded Canadiens.
Hornqvist is a veteran of 90 NHL postseason games, scoring 25 goals with 46 points. He scored a career-high 30 goals in his first full season with Nashville 10 years ago and has had eight seasons with 20-plus goals.
Two seasons ago, Hornqvist scored 29 goals.
In 2016, Hornqvist won the Stanley Cup with the Penguins for the first time; the following year, his goal in Game 6 lifted the Penguins to their second consecutive championship against Hornqvist’s former Nashville teammates.
“There’s no question we will miss his leadership,” Pittsburgh GM Jim Rutherford told reporters.
“We will miss him, He is one of the very top character players in our league. When you miss a player like that, other players have to fill in the gap.”
As far as Matheson goes, a once-promising career in Florida ended in the stands at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena.
Matheson’s rough play in three games in Toronto (including the exhibition loss to Tampa Bay) led coach Joel Quenneville to make him a healthy scratch in Game 3 against the Islanders and again in Game 4.
Where did everything go wrong for Matheson, a player Florida thought so highly of it gave him an eight-year contract after one full NHL season?
Matheson’s biggest struggles came during the 2018-19 season.
Following a two-game suspension for a hit on Vancouver’s Elias Pettersson along the back boards, Matheson never got things going.
Perhaps the death threats he received on his social media accounts from Vancouver fans upset at their star suffering a concussion on the hit got to him.
“I’m trying to stay off it, but it has been very, very disappointing,’’ Matheson said about his Instagram account.
“To think that people could be so inhumane about something … sports were made to bring people together, to cheer on teams and have passion about their teams. I fully understand and respect that.
“But there are thousands of people commenting things on my social media pages — sending me death threats, wishing I would commit suicide or get cancer — that’s bringing things to a whole new level. People have even threatened my dog.”
Yes, Matheson had eight goals and 19 points that season, but his penchant for turning the puck over — especially in bad spots directly in front of the goal — were alarming.
Matheson, at times, was his own worst enemy.
In 2018-19, Matheson led the NHL with 135 giveaways as Florida had three of its defensemen (Ekblad and Yandle) among the league leaders in that dubious category.
Matheson cleaned up that part of his game — to a pretty decent degree — this past season as his turnovers dropped to 54 in 59 games.
Still, when the season resumed, he was on Florida’s bottom defensive pairing with Keith Yandle.
“As the season went on, I started learning the system much more and being more comfortable with it,” Matheson said during the Panthers’ summer camp in July.
“I think I’ve gotten a lot of risk out of my game compared to last year which is what I wanted to work on coming into this year.
“There’s obviously still room for improvement, just like any other player in hockey or any other sport. So I’m still focused on on the areas that I need to continue to get better at and I am really motivated coming into this.’’
Quenneville seemed to get frustrated with him at times leading to a pair of benchings during the regular season including against Philadelphia on Feb. 10.
In his next game out, Quenneville put Matheson at forward — and he scored a goal with two assists.
Matheson played three games at forward before being moved back to defense in San Jose.
He left the team following that game with an undisclosed illness but rejoined the Panthers in Las Vegas and was back in the lineup following the trade deadline in Arizona.
On Jan. 20, Matheson was also benched during the third period of the game in Minnesota (the one where assistant coach Mike Kitchen kicked an yet-unnamed player on the bench who is believed to have been Matheson) after a penalty around the net led to a game-tying goal.
In the Toronto bubble, Matheson was on the ice for all five Tampa Bay goals in the exhibition blowout loss to the Lightning and was bad in the first two games against the Islanders leading to his benching for the final two games of that series.
In his two qualifiers against the Islanders, Matheson was in the penalty box in Game 1 when New York scored what would be the game-winning goal. In Game 2, he took six minutes worth of penalties in the first period and was a minus-2.
Matheson becomes the second player Florida had identified as one of their young core pieces to be traded to the Penguins in the span of the past two seasons — and third overall.
Last season, then-GM Dale Tallon traded Nick Bjugstad and Jared McCann to the Penguins in a move to create more financial flexibility for the 2019 free agency push.
This past season, Vincent Trocheck was sent to the Carolina Hurricanes with the Panthers getting four players in return.
All that remains of ‘The Florida Core’ now is Sasha Barkov, Jonathan Huberdeau and Aaron Ekblad.
Last summer, I spoke to Matheson about his troubled 2018-19 season and he said learning to have a short memory and not letting one mistake cloud the rest of his game was something he was working on — although it was not easy.
“For me, I care so much and that’s where I get myself into trouble,’’ Matheson told me last September.
“I want to win so badly and I want to help the team so badly. And so when I make mistakes, that thought creeps into my head, like, you know, ‘oh you’re not good enough’, or ‘you’re just gonna make a mistake.’
“That’s where the snowball effect happens. You have all of those thoughts creeping into your head, and now you’re going back to get a puck and you’re going to break it out with all of that going on?
“You only have (snaps) that much time to make a decision, and you’re trying to get the clutter out while focusing on hockey and sometimes it just doesn’t work. And so that’s where you need to be able to have it go in one ear and out the other. Move on.”
Ekblad is one of Matheson’s closest friends and was part of the wedding party when Mike married Emily Pfalzer last summer.
Ekblad and Matheson have been paired up together numerous times on the ice and, at one point, the Panthers figured they had their 1-2 punch on defense set for the next decade.
In his first two full seasons with the Panthers, Matheson averaged over 21 minutes of ice-time with Bob Boughner playing him 22:19 in 2018-19.
Last season, Matheson’s playing time dropped as he averaged just 18:02 — ranked sixth among Florida’s defensemen.
“We are together a lot and one of the best parts about playing in the NHL is you have 82 games,’’ Ekblad said last summer when asked about Matheson’s struggles the previous season.
“You’re going to get a chance, just about every night, to grow and prove yourself. So having a very short memory is something I had to learn along the way. It is something I maybe have not mastered, but have become pretty damned good at the last couple of years.
“You have to forget sometimes, just move on. We are defensemen playing against the best players in the world. You are going to get beat sometimes. You want to limit it, but it’s OK to be mad about it in the moment, but move on. I think he is still learning that.”
If Matheson grows into the contract as the Panthers initially thought he would in 2017, good on the Penguins.
Matheson definitely has the skill to be a fine NHL defenseman.
The Panthers, after the past two seasons, just didn’t want to risk taking that chance and be holding a contract which could be harder to move going forward.
Sceviour, 31, spent four seasons with the Panthers after signing as a free agent from Dallas 2016 and had one seasons left on the three-year deal he signed in 2018.
Mostly playing a fourth-line role, Sceviour was a strong defensive forward who was one of Florida’s most counted-on penalty killers.
Sceviour can also score a little bit evidenced by his 11 goals two seasons ago.